


Not on Your Life

by reeby10



Category: Protector of the Small - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen, Kidnapping, POV Alternating, Rescue, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-01
Updated: 2015-09-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 13:45:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4708115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/pseuds/reeby10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“My squire,” she says, as calm as she can when all she wants to do is shout. “Where. Is. He.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not on Your Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



> Written for The Exchange at Fic Corner 2015 for NightsMistress. I hope you like it!
> 
> I started this fic about five times and somehow this came out and just wouldn't stop. I don't even know. I was going for them having an adventure, but it didn't _quite_ pan out that way? I've also never written for this fandom before; I wanted to challenge myself with this exchange, and boy was it ever a challenge. Not entirely sure if that's a good thing or not...

It all starts with yet another sniffle in a nearby village.

Neal thinks that’s all it will be, and he knows Alanna thinks the same or else she would have been more prepared. They’ve done sniffles dozens of times all around the realm by now and they’ve got it down pat.

But they should’ve known things can change in an instant, especially in parts of the realm that haven’t seen a king’s representative in years. Those sorts of places are always touch and go because they tend to be poor and all but forgotten by the apathetic noble overlords or else taxed into impoverishment by the bad ones. No matter what, though, knights know to keep their eyes open.

This is exactly why.

The woman Neal’s been sent in to heal isn’t even sick. He frowns when he realizes that, but goes ahead with his check of her. Alanna would have his head if he missed something just because she doesn’t have the symptoms the others said she did. Better safe than sorry and all that.

He never sees the man who comes up behind him. The last thing he sees is the woman he was checking cowering back, and then everything is darkness.

***

The meeting with the village council to hear about what they need from the king is extremely long and extremely boring. Alanna can feel her patience waning moment by moment and tries to distract herself by thinking about possibly spending the summer in the desert with the Bazhir. She hasn’t been there in quite awhile, and it will be a good learning experience for her squire.

Speaking of… he was supposed to meet her once he’d finished with the sick woman. The reports on her health hadn’t indicated anything complicated, so he should have been back already. It’s a little worrying, though she wouldn’t admit it aloud.

Eventually the meeting ends and she can escape under the guise of exploring the village. Some of the elders seem a little twitchy to her, and she pays close attention to that. Something is off. She just has to figure out what.

The house where she had dropped Neal off at is empty when she gets there. There’s no sign of the woman he was supposed to help, but there are signs that there were people there. An unlit lamp is upended, as well as a chair. It has the look of a struggle, and she feels the bottom drop out of her stomach.

This is not good.

“What happened here?” she asks- more demands- the worried villagers who followed her in.

“She- she gets a little antsy about healings, my lady. She does this sometimes,” one man says, wringing his hands nervously. It’s so obviously a lie it would be laughable if the situations wasn’t so serious. “She’s probably gone to a friend to rest.”

“Right,” she says flatly, watching as he winces back at her words and the purple fires snapping in her eyes. “We will pretend for the moment that I believe you. So where exactly is my squire?”

The silence that greets her is not what she wants to hear at all, and she glares at the man, then the one behind him. They flinch, eyes looking anywhere but at her, and it’s absolutely infuriating. She can feel anger rise up in her, and from the way the villagers back away from her, they can feel it too. Good. She wants them to know she has no desire to put up with the trash they’re giving her.

“My squire,” she says, as calm as she can when all she wants to do is shout. “Where. Is. He.”

“Per-perhaps he just ran off,” the second man manages to get out, voice high and tight. “Young men do that sometimes. They don’t like to be tied down, begging your ladyship’s pardon.”

Alanna viciously fights back the urge to bite his head off for his words and growls, stalking past them out the door. She’s fed up with the avoidance and their lies. She knows her squire- jokester and scatterbrain that he sometimes is, he’s loyal and mostly responsible- and she knows when she’s being played for a fool. It’s not something she likes. At all.

Something is going on in this village, something bad, and she has a terrible feeling that she landed Neal right in the middle of it.

***

Neal comes to with a start when his head bounces off something very hard. He lets out a moan of pain, instinctively curling in on himself, and finds that he can’t move quite right. His hands are tied behind his back and his ankles are tied as well. It takes a moment of blinking to realize that the darkness he’s in isn’t his imagination, there’s something, a bag he thinks, preventing him from seeing.

The cause of his head hitting something seems to be whatever he’s being moved in, some sort of cart probably. He can feel every bump the wheels hit, and the subtle sway as they roll down the road. With no vision it’s hard to say more than just that he’s moving, and it’s even harder to say how long he was knocked out for.

He feels shards of ice hit his stomach as he realizes he’s in very big trouble. And there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.

***

Every villager Alanna talks to is just as tight-lipped and evasive as the first two. The more she talks to them, though, the more she is absolutely sure there is something more sinister going on than just whatever happened to Neal. As a knight of the realm, it’s her job to find out what it is.

She sees the headman’s wife lurking in the doorway when she goes to interrogate him. The woman looks anxious, scared even, and Alanna somehow knows she’ll get more information there than from this sniveling man who is as noncommittal about Neal’s disappearance as everyone else has been.

“Excuse me,” she says, interrupting whatever drivel the headman is spewing. She’s fed up almost to bursting with vague answers and stalling. She wants something real. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

She leaves the room, careful not to let the headman see that she’s going to talk to his wife. She has a feeling he wouldn’t take kindly to the woman telling her anything, and she really doesn’t think she can delay this anymore. There’s no telling what’s happened to Neal or if he’s in imminent danger.

The woman is waiting for her in the shadowed area between the headman’s house and the next one. She looks even more nervous than before, eyes darting around and hand wringing so hard that Alanna thinks it must hurt. When Alanna quietly steps into the alley, the woman jumps.

“Do you know something, madam?” Alanna asks, voice quiet but firm. This is her only chance left to find out what’s happening. Anymore delay and she’ll have to call in support from the nearest fort even if she wants to take care of this herself.

“Ye-yes,” the woman whispers, sounding terrified. Alanna feels a momentary flash of unease about what could possibly have scared this whole village so much, but ignores it. There are more important things to attend to now.

“Tell me.”

And the woman does, eventually, her voice halting and often hoarse with fear too long held inside. With every word, Alanna becomes more angry and worried, and more scared. She’s not sure exactly what she was expecting from this explanation, but this was not it.

The problem is far bigger than one missing squire, even the squire of the King’s Champion. Apparently young men have been going missing from the nearby area for months. The villagers discovered that they were being taken by a group in the nearby mountains to work with some newly discovered element there. The woman isn’t sure exactly what they are doing, no one in the village is, but that wasn’t even the worst part.

The group is blackmailing the villagers through their children, those young men who had been taken. The villagers were told to keep the disappearances a secret, especially from anyone representing the crown, and their children would be kept alive. Perhaps even returned to them when the mining is done.

Alanna understands that they are scared, though that doesn’t make it any easier to think that this has been going on so long with no one reporting it or fighting back. And even more, that none of George’s spies have heard even a whisper about these goings on, even if it is a highly secluded village in the first place.

When the woman finishes speaking, still shaking like a leaf, Alanna hugs her briefly. The woman is brave for speaking to her, especially when one of those missing young men is her own son.

“Thank you,” Alanna says, and means it even through her anger. “I promise you I will find them and stop them. I’ll bring your son back.”

The woman sobs at that, her grip tightening for a moment in thanks and fear before she pulls away and heads back into her home. It’s the only thing she can do, Alanna knows. Wait and hope that finally things will improve.

***

Once she knows what to look for, it’s almost laughably easy to find hints to Neal’s kidnapping. Behind the house where he went missing she finds marks from a horsedrawn cart that are out of place in that area, backed up to the forest as the house is. That’s where she starts her search, spurring her horse to follow the track as villagers watch in mixed fear and hope from the shadowed doorways and windows of their homes.

The path is clear and easy to follow even for a forest path, a sign of how often the group use it to move the young men they capture. Alanna makes quick headway, riding hard but not quite hard enough to tire her horse overmuch. She’ll likely need it still since she has no idea what she’s riding into.

It’s hours later that she reaches the edge of the mountains where she thinks the kidnappers are likely hiding out, the clear path having dissolved away into crisscrossing trails that she can no longer read. The area is rife with caves and gullies and all sorts of hidey holes that men who have been out here this long will have certainly found and used to their advantage.

 _Please, Goddess_ , she thinks. _Let me find them. ___

__The sun is dipping early between the mountains as she searches, eyes and ears alert for any sign of other people. As the minutes and hours tick away, things begin to feel hopeless. She’s never been one to give up, but when all alone and faced with this huge swatch of wilderness, she wonders if not sending for help was a mistake._ _

__Just as she’s considering turning back to send a messenger from the village to the nearest royal outpost, she hears something out of place. It’s the rough scrape of rock on rock, faint but there none the less. It’s the sound of mining, the sound she’s been waiting for, and she heads toward it with renewed vigour._ _

__Rounding a copse of trees at the edge of the forest, she’s forced to halt as the ground suddenly drops away a dozen feet in front of her. Narrowing her eyes, she can see people moving around in the quarry below. Chains dangle at the ankles of the majority of the figures, obviously the kidnapped young men. Sprinkled throughout are older, mean looking men with whips._ _

__Alanna grits her teeth at the immediate urge to go charging down as fast as possible, sword flying. No, she needs to be smart about it. She’s outnumbered, though that’s not really something that bothers her. What bothers her is making sure all of the innocents are kept out of harms way. Hopefully she can find Neal to help her._ _

__As quietly as she can on her horse, she finds a way down the cliff face to the main camp. There are a few grungy looking tents and huts a ways away from the quarry, a sad looking setup for a group which has been operating out here for so long. There are also two horses still hitched to a cart, clearly unhappy about not being free, though there don’t seem to be any people in the camp as far as she can tell._ _

__She decides to check the cart first since she knows that’s how Neal was taken. She hitches her own horse to a tree before heading over to the cart, alert for any sound or movement. A tarp is tied to the top of the cart and she lifts it slowly, free hand ready to grab a knife if it’s some sort of trap._ _

__“Neal,” she breathes out when she sees the figure in the bed of the cart. There’s a bag over his head and his hands and feet are tied, but he seems to be breathing._ _

__At the sound of her voice, Neal moves a little, writing as much as he can in his ties. “Lady Knight?” his voice rasps out, voice muffled by the bag._ _

__“It’s me,” she says, a smile breaking out on her face. He should be fine. “I’ll have you out in a moment.”_ _

__True to her word, it doesn’t take long to untie him and remove the bag. He seems disoriented and he’s dehydrated, drinking almost all the water in her waterskin in one go, but he’s coherent and determined to help once she explains why he was taken. Good. It will take them both to take this group down._ _

____

***

In the end, taking down the kidnapping group is almost anticlimactic. They’re ill prepared for a group that had kidnapped dozens of young men and terrified an entire village. It helps that their captives are more than happy to help out once they realize a knight and squire are there to rescue them.

Disappointingly, Alanna doesn’t even have to draw her sword. Riding in on a horse, hands bathed in her purple Gift, is more than enough to have the men running. The young men mostly do the rest, tackling their captors and holding them until she and Neal can round them all up. There’s only eight of them, far fewer than she would have thought from their reputation in the village.

“I think this is all of them,” Neal says, dragging over the last of the kidnappers, the man still struggling to get free despite the rope Neal used to bind him.

“Good,” Alanna says, glaring at the man. He visibly wilts, which makes her smile. “Put him with the others.”

They’ve commandeered the cart to carry the kidnappers in. It seems fitting to Alanna that they’re carried off to justice in the same vehicle they carried Neal off with. The young men that had been captured will all walk along behind and beside the cart, except for one who was too sick so is taking Alanna’s place on her horse.

“First stop the village, then the nearest magistrate,” Alanna says as they start off back down the forest path. “These ruffians will be in chains in no time and then we can find out what they were mining.”

“Good,” Neal replies, sounding grumpy. His head probably still hurts from his time being tossed around in the cart, so he has good reason in Alanna’s opinion.

That thought makes her realize that she hasn’t asked after his health, too distracted by taking the kidnapping group down. It’s her responsibility as his knight master to make sure he’s as safe as possible with what they do. She’s afraid she may have been a bit remiss in that.

“Are you alright?” she asks him, quietly enough that the former captives nearest them can’t hear.

Neal looks at her a little strangely, probably because that’s not something she’s asked him before. She’s usually more standoffish, which hasn’t seemed to deter him from speaking his mind so far, but she feels like this time she, at least, needs to make more of an effort at reaffirming their interpersonal relationship

They’ve been in danger before, it’s what they do, what they’ve pledged their lives for, but it’s somehow different having him snatched right out from under her nose when they’re on a standard walk through in a seemingly dangerless village. She feels, somehow, that she’s failed him in not being able to stop his kidnap, in not being faster to find him, in not asking after his health before.

“I’m fine…” he says slowly, and she thinks he means it. He’s not one to hold back if something’s bothering him. He’s more one to complain about it loudly and often, especially if it can get a rise out of her. “But I’m sure you can make it up to me by stopping with the village visits to cure sniffles.”

Alanna snorts, feeling much better. “Not on your life, boy,” she says, a smile pulling at the corners of her eyes. “Not on your life.”

**Author's Note:**

> Concrit welcome. If you like my fic, come chat with me [on tumblr](http://voldiebuns.tumblr.com/) or maybe [buy me a coffee](http://ko-fi.com/A7274PC).


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